“Too late to turn back now,” he told himself, foot aching as he pushed himself forward.
He didn’t allow himself to think of the accident very often. When he did, it was at times like this—when he felt as if the world he inhabited was against him in some profound way.
He’d been up on the hill cutting firewood. It was a pleasant late-summer morning a year after he and Sara were married. He’d found a clearing full of deadfalls, already dried out, and was cutting them into stove-sized pieces and loading them onto the cart. He worked all morning, went home for lunch, then returned to the woods, pleased with how much he’d accomplished. He’d told Sara to keep supper warm—he’d work until either the wagon was full or it grew too dark. She’d frowned, never liking it when he was in the woods after nightfall.
“Don’t be too late,” she’d said.
But the work was going so well, with the wagon almost full, that dusk came and went, and Martin kept sawing. His shoulders and back ached, but it was a good kind of ache. At last, he could get no more wood on the wagon. He gathered his saws and ax, hitched the horse back up to the cart, and began the slow and careful descent of the hill. It was quite dark by then, and he walked beside the horse, guiding her around rocks, over roots and gullies. When they were just past the Devil’s Hand, the horse froze.
“Come on, girl,” he urged, pulling the reins and giving her a gentle swat. But she refused to budge, her eyes focused straight ahead, ears pricked up at attention. She took a step backward, whinnied nervously. Martin heard a twig snap in the darkness ahead of them. He gave the horse a reassuring pat on the neck.
“Steady, girl,” he said, then stepped forward into the shadows to investigate.
He never could say what had been out in the woods that night. When Lucius asked him about it later, Martin claimed that he hadn’t seen anything, that the horse had been spooked by a sound.
“That old mare you’ve got is as steady as they come,” Lucius had said. “Must have been a bear. Or a catamount. There had to be something that frightened her like that.”
Martin nodded, and didn’t tell his brother, or even Sara, what he’d really seen: a flash of pale white, like an owl, only much, much larger. It had been in a low branch and swooped down onto the forest floor, making a strange sort of hiss in flight. It had looked…almost human. But no person could move that way—it was too quick, too fluid. And there had been a smell, a terrible burning-fat sort of reek.
This was too much for the horse, who instantly bolted straight ahead, right for Martin. He saw her coming, knew what he had to do, but his brain was spinning in circles from fear, and he couldn’t seem to make his body move. His eyes were locked on the horse’s eyes, which bulged with panic. At last, Martin dove to get out of her way, but not in time, not far enough. The horse knocked him down and trampled his legs, breaking his left femur with an audible snap. His temple caught the edge of a large rock on the way down, and the world got darker and his vision blurred. The cart ran over his left foot, crushing it from the ankle down. He could feel the bones grinding under the wheel. The pain, though excruciating, felt far away, almost as if it were happening to someone else. Behind him, a twig snapped. He turned, and saw the pale figure move off into the shadows just before he lost consciousness.
The cart broke apart halfway down the hill, and the horse arrived back at the barn, dragging what remained of the shaft and front axle, the wheels smashed to pieces. Afterward, he learned that when Sara saw this, she gathered a lantern and went looking for him.
“I was sure I would find you dead,” she told him later. “I almost couldn’t bring myself to climb the hill. I didn’t want to see.”
She found him alive but unconscious, crushed and bleeding. Sara managed to lash together a stretcher from two saplings and Martin’s coat and dragged him down the hill by herself.
In the weeks of Martin’s recovery, during which Lucius reset hisbones as best he could and Sara wrapped his leg and foot in poultices to speed the healing, he would ask her again and again how she, so tiny, had managed to get him down the hill.
“I suppose God helped me,” she told him.
On he trudged, following the animal’s small tracks, unsure of where he was or how much time had passed. He searched for the sun in the sky, but there was too much snow, too much gray, for him even to see it. Though he knew the woods around the farm well from his years of hunting and gathering firewood and maple sap, he didn’t recognize a single landmark. The trees around him seemed gangly and monsterlike as they fought their way up toward the light. The snow was falling too hard, too thickly, covering everything familiar. He followed the tracks, the only thing he was sure of, and was relieved when they circled back toward the rocks. He was exhausted. Hungry. His foot ached, and his mouth was dry. He sucked on clumps of snow, but it did little to quench his thirst.
Crisscrossing what remained of his footprints from earlier, he climbed back up the hill, slipping and sliding on the steep parts, grabbing hold of poplars and beech trees, and came, at last, to the Devil’s Hand—a collection of enormous rocks that seemed to reach straight upward, wearing a fresh glove of pure white snow. But there, in the shadow of the center finger, right where the tracks led, the snow had been pushed away, and there was a little opening he’d never noticed before. The small mouth of a cave.
Martin crept to the entrance. It was quite narrow, barely large enough for a man to crawl through, and didn’t appear to be very deep. It seemed a cozy little alcove. The fox rested against the wall, panting, thinking perhaps that it was hidden in the shadows. Martin smiled. She’d been hit in the left flank, the fur blown away, flesh exposed. He could smell the rich iron scent of her blood. Her whole body seemed to tremble as she watched him, waiting.
Martin raised the gun and pointed the barrel into the cave.
He aimed for the head, not wanting to ruin the pelt.
Where’s Gertie?” Sara was running toward the barn as Martin came out. He’d skinned the fox and nailed the pelt up to dry against the north wall of the barn. He’d done a messy job, nothing like what Sara would do, but, still, it was done. He’d succeeded.
Martin blinked at her, the bright snow overwhelming after the darkness of the barn. “Not here,” he said. He was tired. Cold. Impatient. Killing the fox should have left him feeling satisfied, but instead it had unsettled him, perhaps because at the end it hadn’t been a fair fight, the animal cornered and frightened.
Sara’s eyes were wild, frantic. She hadn’t put on a coat, and stood shivering in her sweater and housedress. Snow sat in great clumps in her hair and on her shoulders.
“Where have you been?” she asked, her eyes moving over Martin’s soaked, muddy pants, his coat stained with fresh blood.
“The fox came back. Killed three hens. I tracked it down and shot it.” He raised his head high as he said this.See what I can do? I can protect what is ours. I have the heart of a hero.
“I skinned the fox,” he said. “I thought you might make Gertie a hat.”
Sara reached out and grabbed the sleeve of his coat, fingers working their way into the damp wool. “Gertie wasn’t with you?”
“Of course not. She was still in bed when I left.”
All Martin wanted was to go inside and change into dry clothes, have some breakfast and a hot cup of coffee. He had little patience for Sara’s need to have Gertie by her side at every second, for her near panic whenever the girl was out of sight for more than five minutes.
